The expanding focus and concern over security has driven the closed circuit television (“CCTV”) surveillance industry to continue to expand not only the scale of CCTV surveillance systems, but also the features offered. A typical CCTV surveillance system includes one or more cameras from which video images can be displayed on one or more video monitors. The matching of a video signal from a camera to a monitor is typically accomplished via a video switch device. Conversely, the control of a specific camera through a user's operation of a control panel “keyboard” is routed through the switch device.
Textual information is typically overlaid on the video image and displayed on a monitor to aid configuration of the system, identification of the image origin, location of the camera, etc. The text is stored in non-volatile system memory and used to assemble configuration menus, date/time, location information, and the like. As feature offerings expand so to does the amount of textual information which must be stored in the system's memory. The undesirable result is that additional storage must be provided in the system.
This problem is exacerbated by the need to support multiple languages. In order to support multiple languages, additional memory for storage of text in the multiple languages must be provided. Further, programming the system to accommodate the multiple languages results in increased system complexity and storage requirements because existing systems typically implement redundant code to invoke and allow operation in the various languages.
In addition, systems which use multiple monitors such as are found in complex closed circuit television security systems may employ these monitors at different locations. Large installations may have monitors which are viewed by different persons at different times. The individuals monitoring the system may be deployed at different locations or at the same location. Further, individuals on different shifts may be stronger in one language than another. As such, the individual's ability to understand the text presented on the monitor may be impaired if the individual is forced to view the textual information in a language in which the individual is not fluent. This problem is exacerbated by languages which have an extremely large number of characters such as Chinese, Japanese, etc. due to the need to store display character font data.
It is therefore desirable to have a system which allows multiple languages to be simultaneously displayed on the same or different monitors. It is further desirable to be able to display these different languages by employing efficient programmatic code so that a programmer need not duplicate or customize the programmatic code to accomplish the multiple language display. In other words, it is desirable to have a system and method for generating the multiple simultaneous languages which do not require that a portion of the code be duplicated to support each separate language. As such, it is desirable to have a method and system which minimizes or even avoids the need to duplicate programmatic software code to accommodate the simultaneous display of multiple languages.